Teaching, rebuking, correcting & training in righteous web design.

The Facebook Like Button Plugin for WordPress

April 22, 2010by meandean

Facebook rocked the internet yesterday with 5 new plugins, one of which is an API for the Facebook Like Button. After reading about it and playing a bit with the Facebook’s Like Button generator, I decided what’s needed is a WordPress plugin that allows folks to easily configure the look-and-feel of the Facebook Like Button, and then automatically add it the beginning and/or the end of their posts.

Update 26-Apr-10

Update 25-Apr-10

Version 0.4 just got released – it now has a preview feature built into the administrator panel … and I’m starting to get translation .po & .mo files from abroad (thanks!-). It’s also now being distributed via the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Update 24-Apr-10

Version 0.2 is released as of Saturday, April 24, 2010 7:14 Eastern Standard Time.

Also after some excellent email and FB message feedback from some early adopters, you can now also decide whether or not you want the FaceBook Like Button to appear on the top and/or bottom of individual pages, individual posts and/or your front page.

Installation & Use

I also wanted to keep it simple, so here’s how it works — using the standard WordPress plugin installation process:

Upload the ‘fblikebutton.zip’ file to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory using wget, curl of ftp.

‘unzip’ the ‘fblikebutton.zip’ which will create the folder to the directory `/wp-content/plugins/fblikebutton`

Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

Configure the plugin through ‘FBLikeButton’ submenu in the the ‘Settings’ section of the WordPress admin menu.

Modify the fields to choice and save.

Here’s a screen shot below of the administrator screen (you’ll want to click on it to see it full size):

Here’s how the FaceBook Like button appears on the bottom of this post:

This being being version 0.1, you can bet your sweet bippee there’s more to come. Still, I wanted to get this out to the WordPress community as fast as possible.

A bit more about the FaceBook Like Button

What’s nice about the Facebook Like button is that no login to your site is required. Even if youâ€™ve never visited HealYourChurchWebsite.com before, they can get social context starting with their very first visit.

If you’re logged into FaceBook, then you can see which of your friends like a site — without the site knowing anything about you. Pretty neat, huh?

I have used the plugin on to my site and it is very useful. I think there are couple of suggestion that I feel must be added to your existing version:
1 . meta data og:image should be added so that user in facebook can see images in their profile in facebook.This will helpful for user with site like mine who have an image gallery
Link: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like

2. Like button shows only number, option should be enabled to show names of people who like.

I would like to edit the existing plugin to add the feature 1 above, can any one pease help me with codes.

Thanks for the great plug-in. However, I found a minor bug. It appears when a user has two language (English-us and German de-de), the “like and text” plugin autoamtically shows German text instead of English even though English is set as the primary (top-most).

-I tested it out by liking a post and having a friend like another post, but each post says “[name] and one other person like this.” I found this weird because only one person’s pressing the button and it’s registering two.

-Is there any way we’d be able to see the name and/or a link to the FB page of who’s liking these posts? If it’s someone I’m not FB friends with, it doesn’t even tell me who it is.

I don’t know why but when I activate this plugin, it doesn’t show up. I configure it to only show below individual posts and not on pages, and I’m on WP 2.9.2. Can you suggest any reason that might be happening (so I can use your cool plugin)?

Hey Dean, LOVE this plugin. It’s true awesome-sauce. I have stumbled across an instance where I do not want to have the Like Button on a private post (it’s for a specific client and not meant to be shared) how do I deactivate it for that post?

Hi, love this plugin! I have a coupel of pages where I DONT want the like button to show – like on a confirmation page after people give me their email addie – is there a way to turn it off on some pages?

This is the third FB Like WP plugin I’ve tried. It has more features than the other ones. I like the ability to place the button both at the beginning and the end of the post. My only suggestion is to add a note in the height field to let users know the default height of 25 will not allow pictures to display even if you have pictures checked. It took me awhile to figure this out.